Hey Y’all,
Welcome back to Amina’s Fli experience, a blog dedicated to detailing the life of a First-Generation Low Income Pre-med student at Bryn Mawr.
In this week’s blog I’m going to talk about 2 of my favorite classes this semester which happen to both be anthropology courses, “Law and Anthropology: The War on Drugs,” and “Medical Anthropology.”
Medical Anthropology
This course has truly enabled me to experience a paradigm shift in my thinking to move beyond common tendencies that narrowly focus on the biological dimensions of illness and healing to instead focusing on how illness, health, and healing are embedded within distinct social, political, and cultural worlds. The class was tasked with the question of understanding our bodies as living artifacts. How do social, cultural and political forces shape health, illness and survival as well as understandings and experiences of “the body”?
Throughout this semester, we have worked to conceptualize medical anthropology as a discipline concerned with the production of truths about bodies and environments. How has language surrounding the female reproductive system shaped our beliefs about the role of women in society? How are such truths produced across cultures, medical systems and different historical periods? The class puts into question the hegemony of biomedicine without devaluing its ongoing contribution to human life.
Patricia Kelly the professor of Medical Anthropology at Haverford has structured the course to approach these questions by examining ethnographic studies and cross-comparative analyses. We are now a mere 2 weeks away from the end of the semester and so far we have covered topics including but not limited to
- disease etiology and healing practice
- theories of embodiment and somatization
- ethnomedicine
- medical pluralism
- (bio)medicalization
- structural violence
- political and moral economies of global health medical humanitarianism
- IV/AIDS and other infectious diseases
- effects of new medical technologies on how we are born, live, and die
I recommend everyone whether they are a stem student or not to take this course 🙂
The next course that I have been truly encapsulated by is my law and Anthropology course. Now I admit to being a bit of a slacker when it comes to the dense academic papers assigned by college professors, but I have read and reread every text this course has offered and enjoyed every minute of it
“Law and Anthropology: The War on Drugs”
This course has been momentous towards the formation of my senior thesis which will be “Prison Abolition: History, Theory and Practice” Throughout this course I was introduced to the effects of the criminalization system on drug users, communities, and incarcerated people themselves. As a class and community, we discussed the relationship between criminalization processes and other modes of social segregation and stratification. I basically went into every class with my mind blown and came out questioning everything I’ve ever been taught and known. (and that is truly not an exaggeration.)
We explored anthropological approaches to the law and legal regimes, with special emphasis on the relationship between law, power and politics, social hierarchy, and the institutionalization of inequality in the United States in the context of the War on Drugs.
Nearing the end of the course, we are now exploring abolitionist possibilities beyond “reforming” the War on Drugs, policing, and imprisonment.
I love this class so much because it allows for critical thinking and community based engagement tackling the so-called War on Drugs, (which I’d like to point out is not a war on drugs at all, but a war waged on people, primarily working-class Black and brown people, as part of the apparatus of mass criminalization and imprisonment that emerged after the Civil War to reproduce racial hierarchy.)
The War on Drugs is just one element of how the law is used to produce and reproduce race and racism in the United States. Professor Nadja laid out the class to allow us to understand not just what the law says, but what it does, from the perspective of those impacted by its effects—criminalized people who use drugs.
In a world structured by white supremacy, settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and ableism, there is no such thing as a truly liberated or safe space entirely free from hierarchy and other forms of domination. The classroom and university are not divorced from the world at large, but rather are inextricably bound to it, and thus are implicated in the reproduction of epistemic and material violence. That being said, I think the professor does an amazing job at unpacking what it means to study the politics of mass incarceration from within the University, an institution that has historically been tasked with producing forms of knowledge (in disciplines like criminology, psychology, sociology, and anthropology) that have justified mass imprisonment.
Our class culture is oriented toward collective liberation. One of the tenets of our classroom is to prioritize the analyses and worldviews of marginalized and oppressed people, and to interrogate and undo white supremacy culture as it shows up in our relationships with each other and to course materials.
2 weeks away from the end of the semester and we are currently discussing some resources to push back against popular framings of the overdose crisis, which paint the War on Drugs as a problem of the over-prescription of opioid medication by unscrupulous doctors, rather than as an inevitable outcome of the dynamics of drug prohibition.
So yea… these 2 classes are by far 2 of my favorite classes this semester and I encourage everyone to take these classes if offered again!